To do eCommerce well you are required to be at least proficient in a large number of areas and skill-sets. The good news is, if you aren’t good at something you can always outsource it and have someone else to do it for you. But every dollar you spend on someone else is a dollar you could have spent catching a new customer, or offering better deals for your current customers, or increasing your adword bid etc. In this information age, the only thing stopping you from learning new skills via YouTube tutorials is your time (and perhaps a small upfront budget), and as always, your own education is always a great investment!
Here are my Top 3 skills that I fall back on almost daily that save me a tonne of money and help drive traffic and conversions, all of which I learnt myself (with some help here and there).
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Graphic Design (Photoshop, illustrator, etc)
Hands down one of the most valuable skills you can learn if you have an interest in it and can spare the time. Because if you can’t, you will have to pay someone else for it!Check out some graphic design blogs, like some Facebook pages, and start appreciating amazing design to get yourself a good eye for it. Great design doesn’t have to be complex (almost always the opposite actually!), but there are a number of basic design principles you must understand to not look amateurish.
Learning things like Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign can be challenging at first, but they can get really fun once you are over that initial learning curve. I started learning the ins and outs of Photoshop as a teenager playing on GIMP, a free image manipulation program. But if you want the real deal Adobe Photoshop, you can now pay a monthly fee to get it at a reasonable price! Of course, there are always even cheaper alternatives. I think the best place to start once you have the software is to just do a few tutorials from YouTube on something interesting to you, to learn the common tools and other features.
A quick tip: If you know someone who knows Photoshop, get them to show you how to use it so it doesn’t feel like such a steep learning curve early on. - Product Photography
Another amazing skill that will make your eCommerce store stand out in a sea of very average product images. Taking amazing pictures of your products doesn’t actually take much work, there are just a number of tricks you have to know to get them looking professional. If you have a decent camera, a tripod and a box with some white paper, you are more than halfway there! This point ties in to the point above though, as editing the images is just as important (really the icing on the cake). Again, there are endless amazing tutorials on YouTube, so take the time to learn this skill and give you potential customers every reason to make a purchase!
- Buying domains, host spaces and setting up websites
These kind of tasks can seem daunting at first, and if you have no interest in them it really may be better to pay someone to do it for you. But they really aren’t that hard once you have done it a couple of times, and you will probably find that working on your own stuff can feel quite achieving! I learnt how to setup a WordPress website through YouTube tutorials (surprise surprise), along with purchasing domain names, setting up nameservers, buying SSL certificates and many other things. But you can always just buy a Shopify store with all of this good to go. But since I have started in my online business adventures, I have set up 12 different websites which would have been a lot more expensive if I paid someone else to do it, or even used Shopify!
These are the technical skills that I have learnt on my own that really help me day to day running an eCommerce store. But everyone brings their own skills to the table, so I think the most important thing to note is play to your strengths, and try to fix your weaknesses. There are a million different things you can do well or poorly when starting your own business, so take the time to become great at at least a couple of them!